Russian Internet is “under martial law,” says NGO report

Agora, an interregional association of Russian civil rights NGOs set up in 2005 to bring together lawyers from regions as diverse as Tatarstan and Chuvashia in the Volga area and Chita in Siberia, has just released its annual report “Internet Freedom in 2016: Under martial law.”

As reported by The Moscow Times, Agora’s report paints a bleak picture, highlighting the following facts and trends:

• In 2016, Russian law enforcement opened 298 criminal cases against people over their online statements. Of those, 29 were convicted and given prison sentences (47 since the beginning of 2015). Three were mandatorily sent to psychiatric hospitals. The average prison term in 2016 for online offences was two years. Combined, the 29 convicted Internet users were given 59 years behind bars.
• In addition to legal prosecution, Russian bloggers and journalists received threats and were subjected to physical assaults. In 2015, Agora registered 28 cases of violence and physical threats against bloggers and reporters from online outlets. In 2016, the figure had doubled to nearly 50 cases.
• In 2016, Agora registered 24,000 cases in which some form of online content was banned. This figure was almost three times greater than 2015, when there were only 7,300 of these rulings. These statistics are all the more notable considering there were only 830 similar cases between 2011 and 2014.
• In the course of the year, several opposition figures reported attempts by intelligence services to access their accounts or intercept text messages. Dozens of human rights activists and journalists were warned by Google that state-backed hackers were attempting to access their accounts.

Last year also saw legislation and regulation get tougher. The number of regulatory initiatives on online information doubled between 2015 and 2016, notes the report. The majority of 97 regulations put in place in 2016 increased government surveillance and the liability of users. Meanwhile, no fewer than 821 media outlets had to separate from their foreign owners in 2016, under legislation curbing international ownership of state media.

Last but not least, in June 2016, the Russian parliament approved amendments to Russia’s “anti-terror” legislation — which Edward Snowden called “Russia’s new Big-Brother law.” Under this legislation, telecom operators, Internet service providers and virtually any website will need to store the content of their users’s communications — including the recordings of all phone calls and the content of all text messages — for a period of six months, while metadata on these communications need to be kept for up to three years. Internet providers will be required to hand over to law enforcement agencies the keys to decrypt all such traffic.

Agora says that an implementation of the law, which will come into force in 2018, will seriously affect Russia’s civil society and give law enforcement more scope for silencing political activists.

In late 2016, the latest report of American NGO Freedom House on Internet freedom across the world offered similar views on Russia. The report assigned Russia the “not free” status, while the country was considered to be “partly free” and “relatively uncensored” just a few years ago.